Learning to Love Gefilte Fish

It took me years of maturation, and some labor-intensive hours in the kitchen, to discover that gefilte fish has been unfairly cast as the red-headed stepchild of the Jewish holiday table.Photograph by Lauren Volo / The Gefilte Manifesto

As a young person, I, like any number of Jewish children, received an early lesson on mortality and heartbreak from a book called “The Carp in the Bathtub.” Published in 1972, the book, written by Barbara Cohen, with illustrations by Joan Halpern, told the story of Harry and Leah, two Brooklyn kids whose mother is renowned for her gefilte fish—the traditional Jewish patties made from ground fish, egg, and matzo meal. Twice a year, for Rosh Hashanah in the fall and Passover in the spring, the siblings’ mother would bring a live carp to reside for a week in the family’s sole bathtub; when the time for holiday-meal preparations arrived, she would carry the doomed creature off to the kitchen. “We knew what she did with him when she got there, although we would never look,” Leah, the story’s narrator, tells us. “She killed him with a club!”

The kids are accustomed to this routine, which was common in the days before refrigeration, until one year they develop an affinity for an “unusually playful and intelligent” carp destined for the Passover table. They name the fish Joe, and plot to save him by smuggling him to a neighbor’s bathtub, but their efforts, alas, prove unsuccessful: their finned friend is killed and eaten just like all that came before him. Although their father subsequently gets the kids a real pet (a cat, which they also name Joe), the siblings, Leah tells us, never eat gefilte fish again. The story is a little like an Ashkenazi version of “Charlotte’s Web,” sentimentality deprived of salvation. It also serves as an anti-gefilte cautionary tale to any child who reads it.

I, for one, took the book’s message to heart, and in my younger years regarded gefilte fish with a mixture of revulsion and perverse curiosity. Whereas the version of the dish found in “The Carp in the Bathtub” at least had the virtue of transparency—what today we might call tub-to-table cooking—my own Midwestern family was at the mercy of Manischewitz, the Jewish food corporation that sells gefilte fish in pickle-type jars. Bland, intractably beige, and (most unforgivably of all) suspended in jelly, the bottled version seemed to have been fashioned, golem-like, from a combination of packing material and crushed hope. I’d watch as my mom spooned the traditional horseradish condiment over nugget after terrible nugget, and feel embarrassed that Jews ate such ugly, mysterious food. While the more accessible of our ethnic foods endeared us to a wider audience—challah french toast, cinnamon-raisin bagels—gefilte fish threatened to undermine the gains. It refused assimilation or window-dressing; it was straight out of the shtetl.

It was while living in New York, somewhere between college and adulthood, that my attitudes finally began to evolve. I was dating a Russian Jew, whose Moldova-bred mother introduced me to the gefilte-fish terrine, a sliceable loaf-shaped version that she bought from a Russian market in Brooklyn. Firm but yielding and delicately flavored, perhaps with a bit of dill, it was a revelation, speaking of craftsmanship and nuance instead of assembly lines and aspic. Enthralled, I began haunting markets in the Brooklyn Russian strongholds of Midwood and Brighton Beach in an effort to find more, exalting each time I discovered a new one sitting in the harsh glow of a display case. At Russ & Daughters, the redoubtable Lower East Side appetizing shop, I even learned to appreciate gefilte in dreaded nugget form when the shop, during Passover season, proffered its special blend, made with a traditional combination of pike, carp, and whitefish embellished with pink, fatty salmon. It began to dawn on me, as it does on many maturing Jews, that I’d spent most of my life caught in the Great Gefilte Lie. The fish was undeserving of its reputation as the red-headed stepchild of the Ashkenazi holiday table. It wasn’t so bad after all, and at its best was very good.

The final revelation, however, came when I began making gefilte fish at home. The first time I tried it, with the help of a recipe by the Jewish cookbook author Joan Nathan, it seemed intimidating and absurdly labor-intensive. After acquiring seven pounds of whole carp, whitefish, and pike, I filleted each fish and ground the flesh, saving the skin, heads, and bones to make a stock, which I eventually used to simmer the dozens of three-inch oval patties I shaped by hand. I remember taxing my food processor to the point of near-extinction, and the raw bits of sticky fish that got caught in my curly hair. But these inconveniences were ultimately eclipsed by the finished product’s faint, beguiling sweetness and almost creamy texture. I served the gefilte, with a big jar of horseradish, to a group of friends for Rosh Hashanah; every last one expressed shock and bewilderment that the dish could be made by human hands, let alone at home.

Photograph by Lauren Volo / The Gefilte Manifesto

My own gefilte awakening has corresponded with a broader reappraisal of Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine in recent years, with restaurants like Mile End, the Canadian deli mini-chain in New York, and Wise Sons, a delicatessen in San Francisco, repackaging schmaltz and chopped liver for a younger generation. In 2014, when Russ & Daughters opened its Lower East Side café, the Timesdeclared that we were living in a “New Golden Age of Jewish-American Deli Food.” (Plenty of old-school establishments, like the soon to close Carnegie Deli, haven’t managed to ride the wave.) Gefilte fish, in particular, has finally gotten its due, thanks in no small part to the efforts of Jeffrey Yoskowitz, Elizabeth Alpern, and Jackie Lilinshtein, three tristate-area millennials who, in 2011, founded the Gefilteria, a boutique Jewish-foods company dedicated to the revival and preservation of Old World preparations. “Under the banner of convenience, the past several decades have seen treasured food traditions stuffed into jars and neglected, gefilte included,” they wrote in their so-called Gefilte Manifesto, which was printed on postcards and originally distributed at outdoor markets and food events. “We of the Gefilteria plan to bring our foods out of the jar and back to the street, to the pushcarts where we began, to the flavors of the people,” it states. To that end, the company began selling “responsibly sourced” gefilte fish made with whitefish and salmon and shaped into an attractive two-tone loaf. Zabar’s sold more than fourteen hundred loaves during the 2013 Passover rush.

Last month, Yoskowitz and Alpern published a cookbook, also called “The Gefilte Manifesto,” which includes traditional recipes for dishes like kasha varnishkes, bialys, and matzo balls as well as modern twists on Jewish or Jewish-inspired fare, from Ashkenazi kimchi to root-vegetable latkes. Among the book’s four recipes for gefilte fish is a version of the centuries-old preparation that gave the dish—Yiddish for “stuffed fish”—its name. “The Gefilte Manifesto” ’s recipe calls for removing and reserving the skin and head from a whole fish before chopping up the meat in a food processor with eggs, oil, matzo meal, and various seasonings. The mixture is then tucked back between the skin, and the reconfigured fish bundled into parchment paper and baked in the oven. In Europe during the Middle Ages, when the price of fish was high, such a method could stretch a single carp to feed an entire family with elegance. Alpern, who serves her version on a bed of roasted onions, writes that the dish “hearkens back to a time when gefilte received the place of honor that it deserves on the table.”

“The Gefilte Manifesto” itself goes a long way toward restoring the dish’s honor. It includes recipes for two kinds of horseradish—a more traditional beet and a hipper carrot-citrus—and a sidebar devoted to the debate over whether gefilte fish should be sweet or peppery. In the introduction to the book’s gefilte chapter, Yoskowitz even gives a shout-out to “The Carp in the Bathtub,” which he notes was one of his “most prized books as a child.” Where I had found a kind of existential horror in the story of poor Joe the carp, Yoskowitz instead finds an affirming message that only a true gefilte lover could discern. “That a family would sacrifice its only bathtub for a week in pursuit of the freshest fish,” he writes, “was a testament to the importance of the dish.”

Rebecca Flint Marx is a senior editor at San Francisco Magazine and the winner of the 2015 James Beard Foundation Journalism Award for Food and Culture.